cak@Purdue.ARPA (Christopher A Kent) (04/04/84)
(Background -- purdue-merlin is acting as a mail relay on behalf of decwrl until their X.25/IP connection is fully straightened out.) I recently saw a message in my outbound mail queue with a recipient of <@Purdue-Merlin.ARPA:hobday@algol.dec-marlboro.ARPA>. This looked rather bogus, so I thought I'd dig into it a bit farther. I looked at the header file (not the data, of course), and found that the message had the following lines: From: Ken Cowan <cowan@udel-relay> To: Ken Hobday ZKO2-3/K23 881-2214 <hobday%algol.DEC@purdue-merlin.arpa> Hmm. How did that get turned into the recipient above? Decwrl is acting as a mail relay for the DEC Engineering network, and uses the .DEC domain internally to indicate this. (Several internet sites currently understand that the .DEC domain is handled by decwrl, by the way.) However, "dec" is also a nickname for "dec-marlboro" in the NIC host table. So it looks like udel-relay, which runs MMDF, is peeking at the left hand side of headers not destined for itself and munging them (for shame!). I know that it used to use the . specifier as an indicator that this should be relayed (this from the old phonenet software), and MMDF has this wonderful habit of expanding nicknames (and capitalizing host names!) in headers that it munges.... So that's what I think happened. Udel-relay peeked at the header and munged it as if it were relaying the note, but it doesn't really end up being relayed after all. The letter didn't make it through. Would the postmaster at Udel-Relay please fix this bogosity? Would other folks running the same mail software (you presumably know who you are) check to make sure that you're not doing the same thing? Cheers, chris ----------
Gds@MIT-XX.ARPA (Greg Skinner) (04/11/84)
I have noticed a similar obscurity: when a mail message passes between decwrl and rhea (as in a UUCP <--> DEC ENET mail message with a pathname ...!decwrl!rhea!...), the headers are munged(?) to look like: Received: from DECWRL.ARPA by RHEA.ARPA with <something or other> where as I understand it, Rhea should be Rhea.DEC. When attempting to send mail through RICE-RHEA (that's what RHEA.ARPA) is, I got undeliverable mail messages stating that the host was down or not accepting mail. Curiouser and curiouser ... -------
covert%castor.DEC@Purdue-Merlin.ARPA (04/11/84)
The addition of the spurious ".ARPA" seems to be a "feature" of all 4.2 BSD Unix mailers, added to be sure that the now required ".ARPA" is there. There was some discussion a while back (either here on on USENET; I've forgotten where) about how this was hard-coded into the 4.2 BSD mailer. -------
drockwel@BBN-VAX.ARPA (Dennis Rockwell) (04/11/84)
Yes, RHEA.ARPA is RICE-RHEA, and is a completely different host from decwrl!rhea. The reason mail doesn't get through to RICE-RHEA is that they are on a net that is unknown to the core gateways at this point. Of course, when domains are real, this name collision will go away, right, folks? Right?